Ears of Corn: Listen by Max Early (review)

In my first poetry workshop, the professor advised me to “write about what you know and about who you are.” At first, it confused me. I thought I had been writing about what I knew. The more I dwelled on his comment, the more it irritated me. So I wrote a list of everything I was and knew, and by the time I got through all of the foods and music and animals I liked, I started to write real facts about having alcoholic parents, diabetic aunties, cancerous uncles, and foster parents who shaped the person I’ve become in both good and bad ways. In short, the final items on the list told me I am a Rez kid, an Ojibwe guy, an Anishinaabeinini. From then on, I started writing about what it means to be a Rez kid. At the same time, I started attending Anishinaabemowin language courses and American Indian literature courses, and I began asking as many questions as I could, because I realized that there was an overwhelming gap between what I knew about being Native and what the idea and experience truly meant. I learned to tap into my ancestry in a way that I had never even considered. My writing became more complex, was filled with deeper understanding, and was more beautiful to me.

This is why I find so much eloquent tranquility and inexpressible passion in Max Early’s Ears of Corn: Listen. I spent time building up to the realization that being indigenous is something beautiful, a thing amazing, an existence worthy of sharing—and there Early is and has been, a neighbor a thousand miles to the south of me, spending his days knowing and loving and experiencing the wonderments of his culture, his family, his Nativeness. It is fortunate for me and all votaries of written spirit that Early has been so kind as to extract so many tiny seeds and bulbs from the grounds of the Laguna Pueblo, sketch such small pockets into the deep flesh of our minds, and leave those tiny gifts to sprout and blossom with incredible elegance and beautiful, bright, interminable illustrations into the hungry darkness of our memories.

Ears of Corn: Listen is a book of poetry. Max Early is a poet. He is also a potter, and his book is as much a well-crafted work of visual allure as it is an ultimate expression of who he is and what he knows. Early didn’t simply write a book to be read, stacked on a shelf, and forgotten. He created tiny stories that mean something to him, that spark a sense of familiarity with me, that stand on the page as proud and anxious to please as the clay dug from the skin of the earth and decorated with the blood of nature. I stepped into the book expecting highly organized, neatly enjambed stanzas, strategic resistance to end-rhyme, even a harsh strictness in meter and line count. What else can readers expect when a physical artist decides to also become a lyrical illustrator? But Early exceeds expectations as he explores the hallowed affection so many of our tribes have regarding the connection between our existence and the rotation of spring, summer, fall, and winter. Early begins, of course, by bearing witness to the vast Laguna Pueblo’s spring: “Spring skies parched, clear and white blue,/Rainmaker smokes with mountain spirits,/Puffing cumulus clouds over Tsee-binna,/Deserts are rainless without a dance.”

Ah, yes. I’ve failed to mention the best part. Ears of Corn: Listen is bilingual. It has been my experience that many Native poets who write in their language write either entirely in their Native language or write in the language of colonization. Like Early, my practice at this point has been to weave the two together. Perhaps it’s my inadequate fluency, but I find something powerful in strangling the English language with the beautiful vines of indigenous language. As...